UNITED NATIONS (AFP) - The UN's top rights official accused Sudan of failing the people of Darfur after her mission to the troubled region found evidence of probable war crimes.
Reporting to the UN Security Council, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour painted a bleak picture of suffering and despair, amid continued attacks on civilians accorded little or no protection by the authorities.
"In short, my mission came away from Sudan gravely concerned that the government and its security forces, particularly the police and the judicial system, are failing the people of Darfur," she said.
Juan Mendez, the UN's special advisor on the prevention of genocide, who accompanied Arbour, said their mission had concluded that "crimes against humanity, war crimes and breaches of the laws of war have probably occurred on a large and systematic scale."
Sudan has been under pressure from the international community to rein in the bloodshed in Darfur, its vast western region where an estimated 50,000 people have died and another 1.4 million have been displaced.
The UN Security Council passed a resolution on September 18 threatening sanctions against the government in Khartoum if it does not take steps to disarm the Arab Janjaweed militias behind the violence.
Sudan called on the militias to help subdue a rebellion that erupted in Darfur in February 2003, as the region's mainly black and poor residents rose up in anger against the Arab-led government they said had ignored their plight.
Arbour and Mendez made it clear that Sudan's efforts to bring security to Darfur had been inadequate and that the authorities did not command the trust and confidence of those they promised to protect.
Most of the displaced have been shunted into squalid and disease-riddled camps where security remains a serious problem and the people are "captives in prisons without walls," Arbour said, calling for an international police force to be deployed in the region.
"It's pretty clear that even when the Sudanese police presence has been considerably increased, it still has virtually no interaction with the camp community and people have no confidence," she told reporters after the closed-door council meeting.
"So it would seem the only way to reverse that lack of trust would be to accompany the Sudanese police force with an international component," she added.
Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail offered the Security Council Khartoum's take on the situation in a separate meeting, after which he told reporters that his government would accept an outside police presence as well as an expanded mandate for African Union monitors to check human rights abuses.
The current AU mandate is simply to monitor ceasefire violations.
Following the council meeting with Ismail, US ambassador John Danforth stressed Sudan's responsibility to disarm, arrest and prosecute Janjaweed leaders, and stop the abuse of civilians.
"We have to make sure the government of Sudan does what it says it's doing," Danforth said. "This is a show-me situation ... They have not done that yet."
He also dismissed as "baloney" Sudanese President Omar el-Beshir's allegation that the United States was backing the rebels "to the hilt."
The United States has called the atrocities in Darfur a genocide, and US Secretary of State Colin Powell on Wednesday told AFP he was disappointed that other nations -- or organisations like the United Nations -- had not followed suit.
Arbour qualified the current level of violence as having changed from large-scale assaults to "individual attacks on a massive scale," especially the rape and murder of women leaving the camps to collect wood.
Mendez said he had made it clear to the Security Council that "we have not turned the corner on preventing genocide from happening in the future, or even the near future."